Geographical Research最新文献

As we move into the second half of the 2020s, it is crucial to reflect on our current promotion of sustainability and consider what lessons can be learned for the post-2030 era. A key consideration in this context is whether the ideal of collaboration, which is seen as essential for just and effective sustainability governance, lives up to its potential. Paying attention to how collaborative efforts to strengthen human–human and/or human–nature relations are scaled can provide nuanced and comprehensive insights into this matter. By analysing current collaborations between the state and Aboriginal peoples in South Australia through the lens of scales as categories of practice, I reveal ongoing restrictions on who has a voice in collaborative decisions, which decisions are made collaboratively, and whose ways of knowing count in these spaces. All these restrictions exist in similar forms elsewhere. My analysis further indicates that overcoming these restrictions requires identifying the right governances for particular contexts and aims, extending collaboration to all aspects of related initiatives, and recognising the validity of multiple co-existing conceptualisations of sustainability. On this basis, I make the case for moving towards sustainability practices that are diverse across contexts, holistic within them, and embedded in diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being. I conclude with a brief reflection on the value of geographical perspectives for this transition.

In recent years, extensive technology adoption has become a notable trend in China’s environmental governance. Although various analytical frameworks such as authoritarian environmentalism have been employed to understand China’s state-led model of environmental governance, the implications of digital technologies for local governance practices remain underexamined. This study investigates how technology adoption shapes China’s water governance at a local scale, focussing on the River Chief System (RCS) in a southern Chinese city. Our findings suggest that digital tools enhance accountability and further consolidate the top-down central-local relationship in China by promoting data-driven modes of governance but do not fundamentally alter underlying power relations or the broader governance structure. By examining how digitalisation interacts with the local operation of the RCS, this paper contributes to hydropolitical literature by shedding light on how small-scale technologies may recalibrate the dynamics of power and water. Beyond the Chinese context, this analysis enriches wider debates on digital environmental governance by demonstrating how “smart” water technologies can reinforce existing hierarchies in authoritarian settings and Global South contexts.

In the contemporary academic literature, rural population decline has generally been regarded as a long-running and almost natural phenomenon. This paper examines the complex temporal, spatial, and cultural dynamics of the population of an inland, largely agriculturally dependent rural region, the New South Wales New England and North West region (SA4 level) from the late 1990s to the 2021 Census. It investigates the key demographic processes that have driven the region’s spatially and temporally uneven experiences of population change—including decline—over this tumultuous period, using these as portents of the regional population’s likely future trajectories. Drawing on custom-created population estimates for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations of this expansive region, the paper explores these processes and trajectories for the population as a whole, then for the non-Indigenous and Indigenous segments. The analysis identifies that a profound ageing process is underway across the entire region, is becoming more severe over time, and is leading to natural decrease for some Shires. However, the region’s Indigenous population presents a striking contrast to the non-Indigenous one, growing rapidly, and increasing its share of the population.

Wildfires have increased in intensity and frequency since the beginning of the 20th century, primarily driven by climatic and socio-economic changes. This shift makes fire suppression an inefficient approach, warranting further investigation into the human component of forest fire prevention. The analysis of social and environmental factors could be useful in assessing wildfire risks. In this study, we assess communication trends by analysing media news and posts about wildfires in Italy, with a specific focus on the Tuscany region. The paper investigates the relationship between wildfires and media habits in specific areas. The communication analysis results reveal that the year 2017 marked the highest peak of fire news in Italy on Twitter [current name: X] (450). Compared with others, Tuscany is the Italian region with the highest number of reports in the studied period (233 over 10 years). Wildfire-related news spread throughout the year, peaking in the dry season (between May and October, and especially from June to August). Statistical analyses, including single-variable, combination, and interaction models, indicate the strongest correlation between newspapers’ chronic articles and the number of wildfire events. The wildfire vs. communication index facilitates the comparison of ecological and social parameters, determining critical areas (CA) in Tuscany. This study highlights the link between media habits and wildfire occurrence as a novel lens for understanding risk perception. Though based in Tuscany, the findings and the index approach offer a transferable method for identifying awareness gaps in fire-prone areas, especially Mediterranean-type regions.

This article develops concepts and methods for a more-than-human historical geography. It does so in response to the concept of the more-than-human archive that has begun to emerge in cultural–historical geography and the environmental humanities. Cultural–historical geographers interested in the more-than-human archive have argued that animals, plants, rocks, and other ecological phenomena have important agencies that are overlooked by culturally dominant anthropocentrism. I argue, however, that this literature has often relied upon ungeographic theories and methods of history that downplay the role of spatial politics in shaping the temporal rhythms of the more-than-human world. The ungeographic ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies informing more-than-human archive literatures have resulted in the archive, a Eurocentric construction with a violent genealogy, being incorrectly taken as an unproblematic metaphor for narrating historical geography. To develop a more critical spatial–historical reading of the more-than-human, I turn to my own research on Atlantic salmon. I propose three conceptual figures of more-than-human historical geography based on my encounters in the salmon rivers of southwest Britain: the assemblage, the archive, and the ancestor. This tripartite conceptualisation of more-than-human historical geography evidences the difference a more-than-archival, spatial–historical approach makes to the way we understand ecological politics.

Journal records of explorers’ routes can illuminate colonial vegetation patterns and fire regimes at regional scales. Using geographic information systems and current vegetation and fire history mapping, we analyse the 1830 and 1833 expeditions to make contact with the Toogee nation of western Tasmania made by George Augustus Robinson with the assistance of Tasmanian Aboriginal guides. We found that Robinson’s routes were concentrated on treeless vegetation (72%), and daily journal entries that reported traversing forest and treeless vegetation concurred with our analyses of contemporary vegetation maps. We estimate that 41% of the flammable vegetation (forest and treeless combined) that Robinson traversed has not been burned in the last 50 years, with 32% of the treeless moorland and scrub vegetation currently in a long-unburned state. We conclude that Tasmanian Aboriginal people targeted treeless areas for travel taking advantage of open ecosystems that they had managed over millennia using frequent burning. This historical knowledge contributes to the fire management of the region, supporting calls for restoring cultural burning programmes.